Oscar Smoje: avant‒garde, graphic design, and publishing innovation (1963‒1976)

Abstract

Visual artist, advertising creative, teacher, cultural manager; the career of Oscar Smoje (1939) has been recognized in the field of argentine plastic arts and graphic design in recent years. Although Smoje worked in a series of publishing houses that contributed to the renewal of the industry in the sixties and seventies, his passage through the publishing industry has not been addressed by critics. Smoje adeptly navigated between experiences in avant-garde art and his work as a graphic designer in the realms of print advertising, journalism, and publishing. By articulating these dimensions, I aim to reconstruct Smoje's professional trajectory during this period to interrelate the pieces of his multifaceted activity and thus outline the contours of a cultural geography, or better yet, a space in‒between disciplines and spheres of activity. This entails interrogating, through an intellectual itinerary, aspects that have not been explored of the hegemonic reorganization movement that characterizes argentine society in the sixties and seventies, and exploring the role assumed by printed visual design —and its producers— in the unfolding of an emergent cultural formation.